Historical Body is the title of a research framework adopted by EX NUNC over the first years of its activity. It developed into a series of online and offline projects presented between 2015 and 2017.

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Performance lives and prospers in the present time, being fully engaged with contemporaneity, with the here-and-now of current times; nevertheless, the body producing the action is not a one-dimensional entity, rather it is a concentrate of temporalities, a surface on which Past carves its traces, and Future casts its shadows. The performative gesture itself is a moment of interruption in the rationally defined flux of time, a point of encounter for the realised and the potential, now clashing in a pure state of presence, of action, of impact.

 

A performance artist, enacting their presence through a movement, an image, a word, is putting into discussion their very position in this world, coming to terms with the many definitions of time that their body contains. Many performance artists use their working instruments to investigate histories, personal and/or collective ones, in order to describe and put into discussions memories and impressions of the past, with the final purpose to enlarge their awareness of contemporaneity.

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With Historical Body, EX NUNC chooses to move in a similar direction, initiating a 2 years-long research project that wants to underline the relevance of historical thinking in contemporary discourse about Performance and Performativity.